


i revive, see it when i come alive

by biggrstaffbunch



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: M/M, POV Second Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-07
Updated: 2014-04-07
Packaged: 2018-01-18 14:02:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,123
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1431175
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/biggrstaffbunch/pseuds/biggrstaffbunch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>He falls. You follow after. </i>
</p><p> </p><p>  <i>When you drag him from the water, he is water-logged and heavy. He lies on the ground, broken and bloody. Even that feels more like a memory than it should.</i></p><p> </p><p>  <i>So you leave him by the water, and you run.</i></p><p> </p><p>Bucky, in the aftermath.</p>
            </blockquote>





	i revive, see it when i come alive

**Author's Note:**

> HUGE thank you to [stitch](http://archiveofourown.org/users/stitchingatthecircuitboard/pseuds/stitchingatthecircuitboard) for all her help. Without her, this wouldn't have seen the light of day!

Onboard an exploding Helicarrier, you are given a name.

You do not live; you exist. You seek, you kill, you sleep. That is your purpose. That is your need. You are the clearest path to an objective met, and you own nothing else. Are nothing else. Only the job. Only the weapon. Only the mission.

(Vessels don’t get to carry anything but what is put inside them.)

Then this mission turns into a man. A man with steel in his spine, who won’t stay down, who won’t run away. These things always have one inevitable, unalterable end: death--yours, or theirs. But this man doesn’t die. This man doesn’t kill.

He looks at you. Not with fear, not with disgust. With recognition.

He calls you his friend.

For the first time, you can see your face in someone else’s eyes, and it sends you hurtling outside of yourself, full-bodied, like being thrown out a window. There is anger. There is confusion. There is _feeling_ , and it is an agony that lights your nerves on fire. You know what happens next; you clench your teeth and wait for erasure.

But it doesn’t come, even as the taste of rubber lingers in your mouth. Instead, you get surrender. A promise. One that echoes in every fiber of your muscles, the twitch of your lips.

This man knows you. And you think you must know him, too.

Your hand spasms, falters. Your world is no longer one of absolutes. There is no savage intent from on high, guiding you into the breach like a missile strike. Your trajectory is interrupted, pushed wildly off-course by the sudden screaming discord inside your head, the questions that start whispering just under the surface, just out of reach.

How dare he make you more than what your makers have made you? 

He falls. You follow after.

When you drag him from the water, he is water-logged and heavy. He lies on the ground, broken and bloody. Even that feels more like a memory than it should.

So you leave him by the water, and you run.

 

  
|  


There is nowhere to go. You are an expert tracker, but there is nothing to track. You are a ghost.

You walk the streets of D.C., a shadow with a silver arm, and you look for clues to lead you back to yourself.

  
  
|  


“Look, mom! It’s Bucky!”

A little girl with pigtails and shining brown eyes points at you near the National Mall. She tugs on her mother’s sleeve. The woman pays no attention. “Mom, come on,” the girl continues. “It’s Captain America’s friend! From the Smithsonian! Look!”

Still no answer. Not even a peep. The little girl pouts.

You tilt your head.

  
  
  
|

 

The clothing you wear feels strange. You are so used to being constricted, leather straps and binding gloves, the lacing of boots. Little reminders of the control you wield. The control of being wielded. The soft cotton and denim of your t-shirt and jeans, the worn material of the baseball cap pulled low over your eyes...it’s disorienting. Like wearing someone else’s skin.

And yet. It makes the discovery of your face on the wall, young and handsome and infused with a light that makes your eyes throb, less startling.

You start shaking somewhere between the painted silhouettes and the mannequins. The physiological reaction is new-- you are nothing if not used to compartmentalizing pain. But there in the fine tremors of your hand, in the unsteadiness of your knees, you find evidence of trauma.

Something was done to you.

The smiling face in the newsreel is not empty. It is full. Every eyelash that flickers, every quirk of the mouth. How steady its gaze trains on the man next to him. Each movement speaks volumes of a past, of history, of baggage.

Your reflection catches in the glass case of a pair of replica dog tags, and it looks stripped bare.

Something was _done_ to you.

  
  
|

 

You come back at night to steal the dog tags. You have nothing to call your own but there is a name on those metal plates, and that name is yours.

  
  
|

 

You are James Buchanan Barnes.

You lived once, very long ago.  Then you fell, and everything went dark. Sometimes you remember the bone-crushing impact of ice and rock, drifts of snow up your nose, settling into your lungs, robbing you of breath.  

More often, you remember nothing. You reach out, howling into the void, not sure what you’re trying to catch. A loose thread, maybe.

Your head is full of loose threads. You try to make connections, but there are too many pieces missing. You’re not sure what is yours. What was taken and what was replaced. What is left.

You are James Buchanan Barnes, and you have no idea what that means.

  
  
|  


The memories come in flashes. The images are merciless, because they come without context. You see them. You _feel_ them. But you do not understand.

A boy with blond hair and a defiant chin.  A man with broad shoulders and a gleaming shield.  A back alley, the warmth of a body tucked under your arm. A burnt-out HYDRA base and a thirty mile walk through Austria, shoulder to shoulder, gun at your hip.

_I’m with you til the end of the line, pal._

  
  
|  


You are starting to wonder how long ago this mission began.

  
  
|  


In your dreams, he sings a song about summer skies and heavenly breezes. There’s a painting and a small room where dust particles move lazily in the thin paneled sunbeams. He is wearing a shirt that is open at his throat and four sizes too large. His mouth is lush. Quirked in a smile that is almost incandescent. He says, “Bucky--”

When you wake, your body is warm, and your heart is light.

  
  
|

 

In your dreams, he asphyxiates under the unmerciful grip of your metal arm. It moves like lightning, quick, sharp, knifing cruelly through the dark. The brute strength and ruthless violence of it is almost pure in its totality. You lean into its cabled weight, and he gives you a smile that is almost sweet. There is blood in his teeth. He says, “Bucky--”

When you wake, your eyes are wet and there is bile on your tongue.

  
  
|  


(Man or machine or monster?

It haunts you.)

  
  
|  


HYDRA is gone, but not dead. Soon, the newspapers that you search through by rote might actually contain orders. But you have no interest in attracting their attention, and you can’t afford to lose what little you’ve gained. Forward motion is the only counterpoint you know to the inertia that’s always been the one thing that sends fear thrilling through your veins.

So you throw The Post into a garbage bin, pick a direction, and go.

You end up in New York City.

The Brooklyn Bridge looms over you as you stare out at the East River, the lights of Manhattan visible in the distance. This is where the stories say your life began. You think that these must be the buildings and the roads that will bring color to every black and white recollection that flits behind your eyes. You think that this is where you will get answers.

You find a patch of ground for the night. stare up at the sky. Sleep will not come easy, but there is a measure of silence to the roaring in your head, now.

The stars are familiar here. That much you know.

  
  
|  


There is an apartment building off Lefferts Avenue. You look at it for a long moment and then you say, “Steve.”

It is the first word you’ve spoken in weeks.

  
  
|  


Brooklyn is an echo in the hungry spaces gnawing at your chest. It reverberates in the emptiness. Fills it with nothing but sound, faded and distant.

When the memories become too loud, when they pull at you, when they tell you what you’re supposed to be, what you were, Steve is the only constant that you understand. The element that ties together each disjointed image and thought. Everything converges on him.

Steve, and his voice and the frame of his body, the slope of his nose. Steve, and the trust in his eyes, the brilliance of his smile. Steve, and the good inside him. Steve, and the fever-dream worry, the desperate urgency, the vivid high of living and protecting and...and, wanting.

Steve, and the spark in your head. Steve, and the recognition that blooms in your belly.

 _You’ve known me your whole life_ , he said on that Helicarrier as it blew apart, fragment by fragment.

He is right. Born 1917 in a hospital to a mother and father, or 1944 in a research facility to a murderous political faction, or 2014 within the belly of a flying, crashing war machine. Each time, each life, each person you have been. Every single one of them knows Steve. He is the root and you are the ground. He is embedded in you inextricably.

You might not know yourself. But you know him.

That is something of a start.

  
  
|  


You let yourself be found, eventually.

Standing in front of an apartment complex in Crown Heights, you stare up at brick and mortar, and wait. 

Time is funny. You are prone now to finding humor in things, however grim it might be. And it strikes you that time--it stretches out in front of you. You can feel the minutes tick by. Yet for something so persistent, so undeniable, it is transient too. Look how much of it you’ve lost.

The thick feeling in your throat might be grief. Your nose burns, and touch your fingertips to your eyes, surprised to see them come away wet.

Then the clouds above open up, pouring rain down in heavy loads, soaking your clothes. You close your eyes; out of the fire, into the storm. It is fitting.

The moon is high in the sky by the time you can feel Steve behind you. You think you must have always been able to feel Steve, that when he slept, so much of you slept, too. Now he is awake. You hope it is your turn soon.

“They tore down Ebbets Field,” you tell him.

You turn, blinking rain away. Steve’s eyes are points of light, hard and bright. He carries nothing, not even his shield.

“The drugstore,” you continue. “The barbershop. The movie hall, the burger joint.”  

A crease forms between Steve’s brows. You can read his face like a dossier, know exactly where to hit, what he’d do. How he would move. Your fingers curl into a fist.

“I read some books. But everything they told me to look for is gone.” You swing back around to gaze at the building. “How am I supposed to find myself if there’s nothing left to _find_?”

A hand on your arm. Thumb tracing over the red star before skimming up, squeezing your shoulder. Steve must have a death wish. Steve always has a death wish. A truth through the ages.

“There’s plenty left to find,” he murmurs, and its his voice that makes your fingers uncurl. “Bucky--”

You wrench away. “I’m not him,” you insist.

Steve shuffles behind you. “Winter Soldier,” he offers quietly.

You shake your head, a half-laugh of despair. “I’m not him, either.”

The rain keeps coming down, sheets of it, blurring the building in front of you, cocooning everything in its steady, rhythmic hush. It sounds like a cryo chamber, and you shut your eyes once again.

“I was asleep for so long,” you say. “I finally woke up, and the only thing I know—”

You cut off, stagger, stumble, rain soaking your hair, weighing your shoulders down, pushing you to your knees.

When you can speak again, the words are raw, an open wound.

“Steve. The only thing I know is _you_.”

And Steve, with that old steel in his spine and a tremble in his hand, steps forward. One foot in front of the other, till he’s close enough to touch.

“I know you, too,” Steve says. He crouches down, threads his fingers through the sodden ends of your hair. “Like the goddamned heart of me.

Gently, gently. More gently than anyone has ever been with you. He guides your head to his, presses his forehead to your own.

You can see yourself in his eyes again.

“Bucky,” Steve breathes, and there are cracks in the word, threads of emotion that spiderweb through the rise and fall of his voice. “Come home.”

 

  
|  


There is cold in your bones, and you don’t think that will ever change.  But there is also spring as your shadow, and you don’t think that will ever change, either.

It is enough.


End file.
